


this world is only gonna break your heart

by anothercover



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Endgame trailer broke something inside of me, F/M, Facial Shaving, Friends With Benefits, Grief/Mourning, Mentions Of Infidelity, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sex, Tiny hints of Steve/Bucky but not enough for me to pairing-tag it without feeling like I'm baiting, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 07:27:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16949631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: It’s a fear they’ve all been left with, this idea of a second wave. Thanos as the boogeyman in the night, deciding fifty wasn’t enough and now he’s coming back for seventy-five, and it still makes Natasha roll out of bed to see for herself. Steve’s there in the bathroom, though, right where he should be, even if the adrenaline singing through her blood doesn’t register it right away. There’s a towel knotted around his waist, hair slicked back and shoulders beaded with water, and he’s staring at himself in the mirror, a little forlorn.“Steve,” she says, quietly.He doesn’t turn to look at her. “I was thinking it’s time to kill the beard.”[Blame this on theAvengers: Endgametrailer.]





	this world is only gonna break your heart

**Author's Note:**

> Can be read as a companion to [stand back (watch it burn)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14584188), but doesn't have to be and it's definitely not necessary to read that one first. Apparently my new thing is that I'm just really into Steve and Nat sadfucking after the end of the world! Thank you, Endgame trailer, I needed to be put into an emotional tailspin this week!

  
  
  


Around three in the morning, Natasha gives up on the idea of sleep. She rolls, slowly, to the edge of the bed in an effort to avoid waking its other occupant, but if Steve notices she’s moving, he doesn’t give any indication. They sleep with several inches of space between them; whatever they’ve been doing here, the idea of cuddling is a thing that still feels uncomfortable. Distasteful, almost, to both of them. Not that they’ve ever discussed it, but boundaries sometimes have a way of making themselves known. 

Steve had his head between her thighs for the better part of an hour tonight, beard rasping against her cunt with his tongue twisting and curling in ways that kept her cursing in at least three languages. He’d looked proud of himself once he’d finally come up for air. She can let Steve fuck her on his tongue six ways to sinful, but _cuddling_ , somehow, is too much.

At least she’s not alone in that feeling, though, and for a second, she almost reaches out to stroke her fingers through his hair in fondness. He used to look younger in his sleep; now he just looks weighted. 

Instead, she pulls her underwear back on and borrows his shirt before leaving the room.

When she makes her way to the kitchen, she’s unsurprised to see Clint sitting on top of the counter with his back to her, legs pulled up and crossed beneath him as he sharpens a knife on a leather strap. His boots are still flecked with mud, bits of filth crumbling onto the stainless steel.

 _Tony would have an aneurysm_ , she thinks. She waits for the thought to puncture something in her, some throb of regret or grief, but it doesn’t come. 

Sometimes it’s all just numb. 

The coffee pot hisses; he already had it started for her. She hesitates for a moment, then crosses over to take down a mug from the cabinet. Any of them would be fine, but the first she sees is the stupid one Sam bought for her over his first Christmas on the team, with a cartoon of a tiny cup in a Ravenclaw scarf and a speech bubble over its head saying _espresso patronum_. She hasn’t been back to this compound for over two years, but this mug was still here, waiting. Tony had held onto it instead of emptying all of their personal items into an overlarge dumpster and _that’s_ when it flares up, hot and sudden and paralyzing. 

Natasha closes her eyes against it and waits, counts herself back from a hundred until it subsides. Once it does, she pours herself the coffee she came for. 

Clint is the first to break the silence. 

“Are you in love with Rogers?” he asks.

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

She considers it. “I don’t think so.” 

Clint hums noncommittally and keeps sharpening his knife. 

She takes a sip of her coffee – he’s brewed it exactly the way she likes and with the blend she prefers, too, the light roast with a hint of caramelized orange peel – then turns and throws the mug against the cabinets.

It shatters on impact. Shards explode in all directions, hot liquid splatters across the clean kitchen, and when Clint turns to look at her, just for a second, he looks like _Clint_ again. 

But he still says nothing.

“Stop,” she says. “Stop punishing me.”

“I’m not.”

“Bull _shit_ you’re not.”

His upper lip curls in something like a sneer. “Contrary to whatever you’re thinking, Nat, you don’t factor into everything I do.”

“Then stop treating me like the reason your kids died is because we spent years fucking in every corner of their home.”

Maybe fifty percent of her usual ironclad control blew away with fifty percent of everything else, because those words flew out of Natasha before she gave them any consideration, and now it’s too late to call them back.

Clint stares at her, coldly furious. She watches it fill him, waits for it to spill over, but there’s nothing. Just the silence and she’s out of coffee mugs to break. 

“Can we just –“ she tries, and hates that something desperate has crept into her voice, “can we stop blaming ourselves for – ”

“For what,” he says flatly. “Failing each other?”

It silences her. Completely. 

“You’re pissed that I wasn’t in Wakanda because I took the house arrest. I lost my whole fucking family and all I can think about is how much time with them I _wasted_ resenting that I took that deal. And we kept trying to pretend separation didn’t make a difference, but we haven’t been partners in years and it looks like now Steve’s got _every_ angle covered,” he says, jerking a thumb back towards the bedrooms. “So maybe what you and I really had going for us comes down to proximity and we were always kidding ourselves thinking it meant more.”

 _No. No, you love me_ , she wants to say. _Do you remember that you love me? Do you really think you lost the kids as penance for that?_

“I went after you, Clint,” she tells him. “And you came back with me.”

“Force of habit,” he says, and turns his back to her, pulling the leather strap taut as he tests the edge of the knife against it. 

She presses her lips together, a hard flat line, tries to fling one last volley. “You asked if I’m in love with him. You didn’t ask that because there’s nothing left here at all.”

 _Come back to me. Comebackcomebackcomeback_.

He gives no indication that she’s spoken.

  
****

**+**

  
****

When she returns to the bedroom, Steve’s awake. He’s sitting up in bed, the sheets pooled around his hips and chest bare, a little bleary-eyed and clearly waiting for her.

“No secrets in this place, huh?” she says, leaning back against the closed door. 

Steve shrugs. She appreciates that he’s not sheepish about it, that he doesn’t couch it in anything. He knows everything there is to know; not a lot of point left in being demure about it. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You lying?”

It startles a laugh out of her, an unhappy one. “Just add it to the body count. What’s one more?”

They never talked about the affair. She doesn’t think Steve approved, exactly, but he didn’t disapprove either, and Natasha is his best friend – Steve of all people knows what a messy thing a heart can be. In two years as fugitives, she gave him his occasional visits to Wakanda; he gave Natasha hers to Iowa. He had a hut, she had a barn. He never asked if she felt guilty about Laura, she never asked if he felt guilty about Peggy.

Natasha and Steve look like an unlikely duo, but they have always understood each other. 

Sometimes she wishes they hadn’t started fucking – out of despair and grief, terror and loneliness, but still. Their relationship always had such clear lines and now everything is muddy, including things she thought she knew about herself. Maybe it is just proximity. Maybe her two tactical partners are the only people she’s ever truly trusted and she doesn’t know how to fuck without that. 

But then Steve shifts on the bed, spreads his legs slightly in what she’s come to recognize as an invitation if she wants it, and she finds herself stepping out of her underwear once more before going back to him. She straddles his lap and he slides his hands beneath her borrowed shirt, big enough on her to reach halfway down her thighs. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, thumbs circling her nipples. She doesn’t know why it’s easier to hear that when he’s playing with her tits than it’d be to hear it with a friendly arm over her shoulder, a platonic hug, but it is.

“Me too.” He pinches both nipples suddenly, and not gently. It makes her back arch with appreciation. “Hey, that’s good.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m doing it,” he tells her, and Natasha almost smiles, because she never would’ve expected Steve Rogers to be such a confident, cocky little shit in bed, and she does kind of enjoy that she gets to know this about him. This has always been a mistake, but it’s not the worst one she’s ever made, not by a long shot, and she leans in to kiss him – almost chastely, incongruous with the slow glide of his cock against her cunt through the fabric, the path of his hands cupping her tits. 

She scratches her fingers through his beard, biting slowly along his lower lip for a few minutes until he draws back with a sigh. “I’m gonna jump in the shower,” Steve tells her. “Don’t think I can get back to sleep, so – ”

“Might as well get the day started, sure,” she says. Back to the drawing board once again, more brainstorming on how to counter an absent enemy. “Go on. I’ll get dressed in a few minutes.” 

If it was Clint, he would have made some salacious comment about that being a shame, playfully slapped her ass, bitten her shoulder, tugged down the neckline of her shirt and taken her nipple into his mouth – she knows his playbook by heart, but Steve nods and lets her roll off his lap onto the mattress, splayed on her back.

He leaves the bathroom door open and when she hears the shower start up, she closes her eyes.

Clint isn’t wrong. She _was_ angry that he’d accepted house arrest instead of staying with her. And he’s angry that the rest of them couldn’t stop Thanos when they had the chance, and these are deeply unfair things to be angry about, but it doesn’t negate them, either.

The despair is relentless and it is _crushing_ , and every goddamn day, the ones who were left behind have to fight not to cave under its demands. Natasha wishes she could grab onto her own anger, pull it up from the place it’s buried; sometimes she thinks it might help her stay afloat.

She hasn’t gone looking for it. It feels petty. 

But she thinks about it now, lying here. She sees Clint, keeping his back to her like she’s nothing to him. Sees the betrayal on Bruce’s face last week, when Steve bent to kiss her and she leaned up into it, as though that was something he still had claim to feel. Sees half the world blown to dust…

Deep into her excavation, it takes her awhile to realize the shower’s stopped running, but Steve hasn’t come out. 

It sends a sudden frantic stutter-step in her chest, a trill of anxiety; it’s a fear they’ve all been left with, this idea of a second wave. Thanos as the boogeyman in the night, deciding fifty wasn’t enough and now he’s coming back for seventy-five, and it still makes her roll out of bed to see for herself. 

Steve’s there in the bathroom, though, right where he should be, even if the adrenaline singing through her blood doesn’t register it right away. There’s a towel knotted around his waist, hair slicked back and shoulders beaded with water, and he’s staring at himself in the mirror, a little forlorn. 

“Steve,” she says, quietly. 

He doesn’t turn to look at her. “I was thinking it’s time to kill the beard.”

Natasha rests her hip against the doorframe, waiting for him to lead her onto his train of thought. She hasn’t caught up, but – he’s going somewhere, she thinks, they’ve all had their moments where their brains have grey-screened out. Bruce froze up the last time he tried to walk into his lab when he’d done it the day before without a problem, Thor sometimes trails off in the middle of a sentence.

Steve leans into the mirror, inspecting himself more closely. “What’d Sam call it again?”

“Your sadness beard,” Natasha says. She remembers that day, too, Sam hip-checking Steve and trying to jolt him out of the solemnness he’d sunk into once it had become clear this thing with Tony might not, actually, ever be put right. 

Steve smiles faintly. “Fair point, I guess.”

“He’d have liked hearing you admit that.”

“Kind of a disease we all have, isn’t it? We’re really in love with being right.” He scratches his fingers through his beard, giving it a tug as though he’s only just realized how long it’s gotten. “Back when I was the little guy, I couldn’t grow one of these.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Used to piss me off like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Oh, I’d believe it,” she says. “You’re not a subtle man.”

“All these notes, Romanoff. I got anything at all going for me?”

“I’ve found a few uses,” she drawls, and walks to her medicine cabinet, opening it up. Her toiletry supplies are sparse after so many years away; a half-empty stick of gel deodorant, a dried-out peach lipstick, dental floss, Advil, lotion, a handful of bobby pins and rubber bands still with red hair snarled around them that denotes how long it’s been since they were used – she’s forgotten what it was like to live this way when they had a home base, what it was like to need these things. Scattered artifacts from a life that, all things considered, she’d enjoyed. 

“Any razors?”

“No, but – ” She slides her fingers beneath one of the shelves, finds the handle of one of her knives still stuck on its magnetized runner, and pulls it down. She tests the edge of the blade with her finger. “This’ll do. Still sharp.”

Steve looks at her, impossibly fond. “You hid these in the bathroom?”

“Guns under the bar, bites behind the fridge, garrote in the screening room,” Natasha says. “You never know.”

Without warning, he slips his hands around her waist and lifts her like she’s weightless, depositing her on the edge of the sink. She drapes her legs over his hips for balance, locking her ankles just above his ass. His skin is hot from the shower and she tightens her grip, dragging him closer between her thighs as his towel tumbles to the tile floor, and it pulls a little noise out of him – unexpected arousal, she thinks, and it’s something they’re both still getting used to: the idea that _arousal_ is a thing they can evoke in each other, now. Which feels equal parts strange and attractive, and always at the same time.

Steve keeps steady eye contact as he reaches behind her to turn on the water. She wets her hands, lathers them up with the cake of soap next to the taps and smooths the suds along his face, working them up in tight circles along his jaw, across his upper lip. Slow, deliberate motions before she rinses off and twirls the knife through her fingers, contemplating his facial hair. 

“Do you two need a moment alone together?” he asks. 

Natasha shakes her head. “Scratches my thighs all to hell, which sounds better in theory.”

“You didn’t say,” he says, sounding troubled by it, and she rolls her eyes.

“Yes, I’ve suffered in brave silence these last few weeks, taking one for the team by letting you eat me out,” she says. 

He squeezes the tops of her thighs. “I want it gone. I need to feel like myself again.”

_Because we’re gearing up to fight another war. Because there’s still a few things left we could lose._

She whisks the knife up without warning, a flex of her arm and a flick of her wrist. One clean patch appears on his jaw as if by magic. 

Steve’s eyes flare wide, and Natasha is soaking wet for reasons she can’t explain even to herself, and in the next heartbeat, his grip tightens on her thighs as he pulls her onto his cock, half her ass hanging off the edge of the sink. 

A noise like a gasp forces its way out of her and she sets the knife at his jaw again, fighting to keep her arm steady even as the rest of her body shakes, as he fucks her in fast, urgent strokes with need washing over him in a wave. It’s stupid, it is, the absolute moron could end up with the tip of her knife all the way in his jugular or through his eye – 

But he knows that. She knows he does.

He knows and he trusts that she won’t make a mistake and her eyes are burning now as she loosens her legs from around his waist, spreading her legs wider to give him more room, more control over his thrusts and the pace he’s setting.

She shortens the strokes with the blade, sharp, quick little flicks as her breath comes higher and harder, soap and stray hair flecking messily all over Steve’s chest and her shirt. 

Steve’s mouth moves as she scrapes the blade over his chin. 

“Don’t talk,” she says, her voice high and breathy as he pushes in on a particularly good angle, as she hitches up and digs her knees into his hipbone. “Oh – mmm.”

“He doesn’t get to make you feel like this.”

The next time she drags the edge of the knife along his cheek, she presses down harder – not enough to draw blood, never, but in a warning that Steve doesn’t heed. He digs his nails into her ass, sharp, pulling her back onto him and this time he doesn’t thrust, this time he just holds her there to _squirm_.

“Steve – ”

“I’m not gonna stand by and – ”

“Oh yes you are,” she says, reaches out to grab his jaw and angle his face down, towards hers, even as the edges of her vision water at how good it is – Steve inside her, thick and steady and _still_ , feeling her pulse around him, like a drop in the bass before it comes back to crescendo. In a second, his hips will snap back to rhythm because he won’t be able to hold off any more, in a second her head will fall back and crack the mirror and she’ll come all over him as he spills inside her, in a second in a second but for now – 

For now, she uses the space to shave his upper lip, careful and quick and not close enough that he won’t have to go over it again himself with a proper razor, but later. Later.

His skin is smooth and cleared again, for the first time in over a year. For some reason, the sight of it kickstarts a shock through her body, an electric charge all the way down her spine – this is what Steve looked like when they first met. She’d almost forgotten. This is actually _Steve_ she’s been fucking this whole time, not a mistake or a mislabeling. This has always been Steve. How can it feel like such a surprise when he’s still inside her?

She wonders if he’d feel the same if he saw her with her hair back to its natural red. 

When she drops the now-filthy knife into the basin, he lifts her off the sink and spins to the edge of the bathtub, seats himself in a way that puts Natasha back across his lap. Her feet hit the ground and it’s her turn to set the rhythm, so she takes it. Steve tips his head back, eyes closed with suds streaking his neck – otherwise she’d bite it, he likes that – and she sets herself to riding him with wordless enthusiasm for the task.

When he comes, he opens his eyes and it brings her down along with him – the look, the pout of his lower lip, the flex of his hands still curved along her ass. 

“You know you’re my best friend, right?” he says quietly, once she catches her breath. He’s a mess, soap and shredded hair and his skin faintly pink with burn from her blade.

“I do,” she promises, and tips her forehead against his.

  
  
  


  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> yet another present for my very sweet friend whose only note is always "make it as sad as possible" and will sometimes just drop a prompt like this on me out of nowhere and then i can't function properly until i've written it, hope u are proud of yourself.


End file.
